that summer |percabeth au| ✔︎

CHAPTER TWENTY - You Can't Put A Condom On Your Heart

"Who would've thought one little bug could make so much noise?" Artemis peeked through the cage of her fingers at the cricket she'd just captured. "We're gonna be finding them everywhere for weeks."

The morning after our club outing, Percy and I had arrived at the Queen of to find her filled with buckets of raw, chopped fish—an impressively disgusting feat that Travis must've stayed up all night to accomplish. The stench alone would've been enough to warrant pirate retaliation, but thanks to my shattered window, a dozen gulls had snuck in, lining up to feast.

"Gives new meaning to the phrase 'poop deck', anyway," Percy had said. The sight was so incredibly awful, all we could do was laugh. With one hand on my shoulder, through tears of hilarity that teetered on insanity, Percy shouted at the sea. "Stoll! You pirate!"

The two of us had sat on the docks then, texting for reinforcements. Twenty minutes later Artemis showed up, James in tow, dressed to scrub. And despite the fact that she'd spent the previous night dancing and flirting with Travis, even Katie answered our SOS, strolling down the docks in overalls and rubber gloves up to her elbows.

It took us all day to clean up the mess. I suggested taking the remaining fish parts back to their owner, dumping them into the Never Flounder, but Percy was cooking up a different plan.

He said it was best to wait a few days to wage a retaliation, let the other guy think he was in the clear.

This morning, five days after the fish attack, we made our move.

"Piracy rule number one," Percy said on the drive to the pet store. "Pirates don't acknowledge the piracy to the pirate. When we see Stoll, it's like this never happened."

I nodded.

"Rule number two," James said. He was sandwiched between Katie and Artemis in the backseat, his dark hair blowing all around. "Pirates don't need baths. Pirates are stinky on purpose."

Percy met his eyes in the rearview. "Overruled. If you want to camp out tonight, you're getting hosed down first. I'm not sharing a tent with a skunk."

James giggled. "You're the skunk!"

Percy navigated us into the pet store lot. He winked at me and got out of the truck, leaving it running with the rest of us inside. Ten minutes later he was back with the crickets. Boxes and boxes of them.

"I grabbed whatever they had," he said, securing them in the trunk. "Told them it was for James's pet python."

"I don't have a python." James' eyes lit up. "Can I get a python?"

Percy laughed. "Dude. We're definitely not sharing a tent with a snake."

Back at the marina we all gave the boat another scrub-down—the fish smell had yet to vacate, despite copious amounts of bleach—and then Artemis went to pick up lunch for us at the Black Pearl, just to confirm Travis would be tied up at work for the next few hours. Coast clear, Percy and I snuck onto the Never Flounder, crickets in hand.

We opened the boxes, shook out the bugs.

With a wicked gleam in his eyes, Percy said, "Welcome to the apocalypse, Stoll."

Now, hours after our cricket adventures, the girls and I were hanging out in my room. I'd intended to curl up alone and finish Moby Dick, but they'd followed me in as though we'd always been friends, as though my bedroom had always been our hangout.

"Crickets won't totally mess up Travis's boat, right?" Katie asked. "I know he deserves it after the fish thing, but he's under a lot of pressure with his dad, and he's trying to—"